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Guide to Clan Wars matchmaking in Clash of Clans

Please provide feedback if there is a part of matchmaking you don’t understand or if you would like to know more detail, others can then also benefit. We will cover:

the basics

defences and war base optimisation

win-streaks and team balance

.5 in matchmaking

war mirror

looking ahead

The basics

Clans will be matched up based on the overall strength of its members. Strength is based on each member’s attacking power (troops, army camp capacity, spells and heroes) and defensive strength (defence buildings, walls, traps and heroes).

Unlike the Multiplayer mode, trophies do not factor in when clans are matched.

Different layouts and base designs do not affect strength. The only way a member’s strength can be changed is if they upgrade their troops, defences, spells, etc.

Powerful, late-game defences and troops like Inferno Towers, Eagle Artillery and Grand Warden will have much greater matchmaking impact;

War sizes 35v35 and 45v45 were removed in March 2016, in order to boost available matches in other war sizes;

Team-versus-team compositional checks have been added to help weed out imbalanced war matchups.

Finally, matchmaking will factor in Win/Loss records. This ensures that your opponents are worthy adversaries. It will favour matches between Clans with similar recent win/loss records in their recent wars;

Defences and War Base Optimisation

Defensive progress will be playing a much bigger role in Clan Wars matchmaking after the March 2016 update. Previously, the system placed equal weight between offensive (army) and defensive (village) progress, allowing for confusing war matchups between players with relatively over-strong or over-weak defences.

War matchmaking will factor defensive progress much more heavily into every calculation to help to keep War Bases better balanced “in lane.” After all, when Battle Day comes, all that really matters to your team is how strong the opposing defences are.

At the same time, matchmaking calculations have been rebalanced with the goal of better representing village progress. Previously, a village could be carefully manicured to hide a powerful defence or troop from matchmaking. For example, a player could intentionally not build X-Bows and under-upgrade other defences to hide an Inferno Tower from matchmaking, and be treated as a TH9-level defence.

Clan Wars matchmaking will make a much sharper distinction between players who have built high-level items and those who haven’t. Not only will this prevent higher-level players from preying upon lower-level players with hyper-optimized War Bases, but it will also allow high-level players to upgrade lesser units, like Cannons or Minions, without worry of undue penalty by the matchmaking system.

Win-Streaks and Team Balance

In Clan Wars, some Clans struggle to ever come away with a win, while others seem to win constantly and rarely find a challenging opponent. To help Clans find better matches based on their competitiveness, a Clan’s recent war performance will now factor into Clan Wars matchmaking.

Clans who have been recently losing a lot will be more likely to be matched with other Clans who are also struggling to find a win, thus helping to break long losing-streaks. Similarly, Clans who have been winning a lot will be more likely to encounter other winning Clans. A new war statistic “War win streak” will also be shown on Clan profiles, which showcases how many wars a Clan has currently won in a row.

Additionally, Clan Wars matchmaking has been fitted with new routines aimed at better balancing entire teams, rather than just individual lanes. It will place greater emphasis on matching the top of the war map, and less emphasis on matching the bottom. Total team defensive strength will also be analysed to help filter out war matchups that are imbalanced on a map-wide scale.

.5 in matchmaking

The objective of .5 is solely to influence war matchmaking. To ensure that your war weight is minimised and an easier war matchup is found. The principle behind the .5 strategy is to prioritise offence over defence.

The misconception is that a mirror in a Battle Map has some sort of correlation. The Battle Map only reflects the defensive strength of the base; it doesn’t consider offensive troop strength. The place a base occupies on the Battle Map does not reflect the war weight of that base.

Looking Ahead

While no matchmaking system can ever guarantee perfect matches 100% of the time, the work on improving Clan Wars matchmaking is never done. The Clash of Clans dev team has and will continue to make small adjustments and tweaks to Clan Wars matchmaking over time, even if system-wide revamps like these come rarely. The team is also looking forward to making even more improvements to the Clan Wars experience this year, starting with these changes to help everyone get better war matchups.